


The Day-King

by Tanaqui



Category: Bagpuss
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-29
Updated: 2019-12-29
Packaged: 2021-02-27 10:09:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,021
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22015403
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tanaqui/pseuds/Tanaqui
Summary: What is the power behind the magic that allows Bagpuss to wake up when Emily recites her verse?
Comments: 1
Kudos: 4





	The Day-King

**Author's Note:**

  * For [CorpseBrigadier](https://archiveofourown.org/users/CorpseBrigadier/gifts).



> For CorpseBrigadier, who wanted a story depicting Bagpuss or his companions as some manner of occult entities.

Bagpuss yawned and stretched and found himself wide awake. And when Bagpuss wakes up, all his friends wake up too. 

The mice on the mouse organ woke up and stretched, as did Madeleine the rag doll. Gabriel the toad cleared his throat and settled his banjo more comfortably in front of him. Professor Yaffle climbed down stiffly off his bookend and went to see what Emily had brought.

“Nyeh, nyeh, nyeh. Emily hasn’t brought us anything!” Professor Yaffle exclaimed, turning his head this way and that and peering very closely at the floor of the shop window in front of Bagpuss, in case whatever Emily had brought was very small. “There’s nothing here at all. I don’t know why we’re awake.”

“Oh...,” said Bagpuss slowly and thoughtfully. “I know why we’re awake. It’s the time of the Long Dark. Emily doesn’t bring us anything to mend. _We_ must give _her_ something, to bring her back, and so that we shall wake up again.”

“You mean,” said Gabriel, very solemnly, “it’s the Time Of Renewal?”

“Indeed,” said Bagpuss.

“Oh, what shall we give her? What shall we give her?” squeaked the mice. “Everything in the shop belongs to someone else! What _can_ we give her?”

“Why, my dears, we give her what we own,” Madeleine explained patiently and kindly. “Ourselves. Don’t you remember? We give her one of us.”

“Nyeh, nyeh, nyeh.” Professor Yaffle bobbed his head and lifted one foot and then the other. “The Sacrifice.” He froze, one foot in the air, and then carefully set it down. “It can’t be me, of course. I have too much, nyeh, valuable knowledge for it to be, nyeh, lost.”

“And it can’t be Madeleine, for she must tell us the story of the Sacrifice,” Gabriel pointed out. “Or Bagpuss, for he must imagine it, to make it true.”

“Indeed. Indeed.” Professor Yaffle lifted his wings and turned in a circle, before settling back down. “And it can’t be you, Gabriel, for you must provide the music.”

All four of them turned and looked at the mice expectantly. The mice looked at each other for a moment, and then caught one of them by the front paws. “Charlie Mouse! Charlie Mouse! Charlie Mouse!” they squeaked. They pulled him towards Bagpuss, turning him and turning him until he was quite dizzy, while they sang, “We will give him, he will leave us, we will love him, he will save us.”

“Ah, yes,” Bagpuss said slowly. “I remember. Charlie Mouse will be Sacrifice. As it was before, so it is now, and so it shall be.”

You might have noticed, if you looked very closely, that Charlie Mouse wore an expression, just for a moment, that said, “Why is it always me? Why am I always the one who’s pushed into bottles or gets his tail dipped in glue or is poked and hurt and has to be Sacrifice?” 

But Charlie Mouse said nothing, because this was how Bagpuss said it must be. And without Bagpuss, they would all just be decorations on a mouse organ. They wouldn’t wake up and make lost and broken things new and beautiful again, or hear the stories Bagpuss and Madeleine told, or listen to Gabriel’s songs.

So he settled himself between Bagpuss’s paws and closed his eyes, trusting in his friend. And Bagpuss put a large, saggy, soft paw on him and pressed firmly, and all the breath went out of him, quite out of him entirely.

“And now the story, Madeleine,” Gabriel reminded her, when Charlie Mouse, like the things Emily brought them, was lost and broken. “And Bagpuss will imagine it for us.”

“Very well.” Madeleine settled herself more comfortably in her chair. “This was long, long ago, in the time of the people who built the great stone circles and the great round mounds and made beautiful stone knives. When the dark of the year came, they would choose from among them one who would be King for a Day. And all day, from dawn until dusk, they dressed him in fine clothes and gave him fine food to eat and fine sweet honey mead to drink and danced for him and sang for him.”

In each of the minds of those who listened, images and sounds flickered and flashed, as Bagpuss took Madeleine’s words and turned them into reality.

“At the end of the day,” Madeleine continued, “when dark had fallen, the priest-people took the King and put him to death, to appease the dark gods of the night, that they would leave, and to please the bright gods of the day, that they would return. And as the sun rose again over the far hills, the people would send up a great cry and know that the King had been reborn with the sun and that all would come alive again in the coming season.”

And, quite suddenly, Charlie Mouse took a great gasp of air and sat up and looked about him in a daze.

Then the other mice joined hands and danced in a circle around him, while Gabriel played a merry tune and sang. Madeleine waved her hands as if she were conducting him. Even Professor Yaffle bobbed his head and shuffled from foot to foot almost in time to the beat.

In amongst all the hurly-burly, Bagpuss regarded Charlie Mouse with kind eyes. “Thank you, Charlie Mouse,” he said gravely. “Now, when I go to sleep, I know I will wake again when Emily calls me, and you will all wake again, too. It would be quite terrible, I think, to just be an old cloth cat with no magic at all.”

And then Bagpuss gave a big yawn and settled down to sleep. And of course, when Bagpuss goes to sleep, all his friends go to sleep too. The mice were ornaments on the mouse organ. Gabriel and Madeleine were just dolls. Professor Yaffle was a carved wooden bookend of a woodpecker.

Even Bagpuss himself, once he was asleep, was just an old, saggy cloth cat: baggy and a bit loose at the seams. But Emily loved him.


End file.
